Enviro group buys ads backing Coakley in Mass. Senate race

The League of Conservation Voters is buying $350,000 worth of TV ads supporting Democrat Martha Coakley in the final days of the Massachusetts Senate race to replace the late Edward Kennedy.

The ads attack Republican Scott Brown’s opposition to a cap-and-trade bill to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that is pending on Capitol Hill.

“Our economy needs help but Scott Brown would go back to the same Bush-Cheney policies that caused the crisis,” the narrator says in the 30-second ad against Brown, a state senator. The ad then says the climate and energy bill the House passed in June would create jobs.

“On Tuesday, we can say yes to clean energy jobs and greater energy independence by electing Martha Coakley as our new senator,” it states. The ads began airing Thursday and will run on Boston-area broadcast and cable channels until the Jan. 19 special election, according to LCV.

Brown has attacked the climate bill during the campaign, calling cap-and-trade a “giant new tax on energy.”

Recent polls in the race between Brown and Coakley, the state’s attorney general, have been conflicting — one poll released this week showed Coakley with a comfortable lead, while another showed a dead heat.